


Habit versus hobby

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Bickering, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Minor Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Portraits, Pre-Movie: The Old Guard (2020), Team Bonding, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25501171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: “You drink too much, Book.”The question didn’t irk him as much as it surprised him. “A couple of centuries and you bring this up… now?”Joe only shrugged. “Why not? What else is there to talk about?”
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Comments: 48
Kudos: 375





	Habit versus hobby

**Author's Note:**

> Booker and Joe are both my favourite characters in the movie, so this was really just an excuse to write them both being friendly and close to each other, especially after the pain at the end of the movie. A lot of this is based on analysis I got from Tumblr, like Joe and Booker actually being pretty close, and Booker drinking way too much to be considered normal, and how that was probably attributed to his depression and suicidal thoughts and stuff we saw in the movie. I also like the idea of Andy being a not so good cook, just because it makes the most sense. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it x

“You drink too much, Book.”

It was a comment he wasn’t expecting and he glanced up from his glass to the only other person in the room with him, but Joe wasn’t looking at him, too pre-occupied with the sketchbook on his lap, the graphite between his fingers. He wasn’t looking at him, but after all these years, Booker had gotten good at knowing when Joe was sneaking glances at him from under his bushy brows, his lips pressed into a hard line of concentration. He wasn’t sure if Joe was watching to catch his likeliness or to gauge a reaction.

The question didn’t irk him as much as it surprised him. “A couple of centuries and you bring this up… now?”

Joe only shrugged. “Why not? What else is there to talk about?”

“Plenty of things. The football game we’re going to miss. The disaster of a dinner we’re going to be served. The _weather_ ,” Booker counted on his fingers, and each one made more and more sense than the current topic of conversation. “Literally anything else.”

“I have faith in Nicky’s cooking,” Joe said instead, smiling a little. His baseball cap was askew, and Booker knew without a doubt that Nicky would arrive sooner rather than later and the first thing he would do was remove that cap to replace it with his hand and gently play with Joe’s curls. It was like clockwork by now, and Booker had reason to suspect that the only reason Joe wore that stupid hat at all outside of missions was purely for Nicky to intervene.

They returned to a silence that was familiar, soft and gentle and calm, while Andy and Nicky talked quietly in the kitchen, voices low beneath the sizzling of food and the banging of pans and the chopping of vegetables. Joe returned to his sketch, head down and tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, the comforting scratching of the pencil against paper oddly soothing. Booker returned to his drink, and the familiar burn at the back of his throat that had become an old companion to his lifetime of suffering, the dark amber that shifted with the ice as the sunlight from the setting sun streamed in from the open window. It was a nice quiet night, just him and Joe and the others in the kitchen, both lost in their own personal vices- Joe in his art, Booker in his booze.

The glass was almost empty, and he poured himself another one. The ice was melting, and he decided that it wasn’t worth it to enter the kitchen to scoop a couple more cubes from the freezer. Nicky or Andy would just rope him into doing the dishes while they waited for the food to cook, and that’s the last thing he needed. So iceless it is. There were eyes on him again, but when he glanced at the corner where Joe was leaning up against the wall, he was focused solely on his work.

Sometimes, he glanced over at Joe in the corner and caught the familiar pausing of pencil on paper and the swift, momentary glancing, up, down, an adjustment on the paper, a hard line, a softer one, glance up, back down, re-adjust- perfect. It was a pattern he had become increasingly familiar with over the last two hundred years. “What is your muse today?”

“Hm?” Joe paused and glanced up, shutting one eye as the light streaming in from the window crossed his face.

“Your sketch,” Booker nodded towards the book in his hands. “What’s it of?”

“Not sure yet,” Joe’s smile was soft, barely a quirk at the corner of his mouth. “I guess I’m… figuring it out as I go.”

Booker raised his eyebrows at the same time he raised the glass to his lips. “I’m glad you don’t live your life the same way you indulge your artistic endeavours.”

“Who’s to say that I don’t?” Joe smiled for a moment before his nose slowly scrunched up the longer he watched Booker on the other side of the room. “You really do drink too much, though.”

“You drink.”

“Yes, but not every minute of every day.”

“Neither do I,” Booker snorted. “You have your hobbies, I have mine.”

Joe made a face, and Booker had to laugh at it. It wasn’t every day that he could make Joe look like that, his brow furrowed and pinched together, his mouth pressed into a hard line, his nostrils flared slightly. “I wouldn’t exactly call drinking the way you do a ‘hobby’, and if you do, I think it’s about time to find you a new one.”

“After two hundred years?” Booker asked. “Good luck.”

He watched as Joe huffed out a laugh, adjusting his position against the wall to catch the final moments of sunlight without the beams blinding him. “You are a difficult man to like, Book,” Joe said, but there was affection behind it, an emotion that Booker was still so unused to hearing.

Instead of answering, Booker sipped at his iceless drink and hoped the conversation would pass without his input.

Nicky entered the room, loose-limbed and smiling when he caught sight of Joe, and collapsed in the offered safety of Joe’s arms, resting against his stomach with his arms crossed over his chest. A sigh escaped his lips, and Joe adjusted his hold on his book to rake his fingers through Nicky’s hair, sticking it up in odd angles. Booker hid his smile behind his glass. “How is it going in there?”

“You know how it is,” Nicky gestured vaguely, reaching up to take the baseball hat off of Joe’s head and rest it over his stomach instead. “The boss will always be the boss. Even if she fights better than she cooks, and adds too much salt to everything.”

“Blasphemy,” Joe laughed as he bent down to place a feather-light kiss on Nicky’s forehead, giving Nicky the opportunity to reach a hand up and run his fingers through Joe’s curls for a moment before lowering it back down to his chest.

“It will be ready soon,” Nicky shut his eyes, tilted his head further into Joe’s stomach. “I cannot say when, but I assure you, it will be burnt. Or undercooked, somehow. Or both. I’m not sure which is worse.”

“Ah,” Joe met Booker’s eyes across the room, and there was humour in them, an understanding sort of mirth that Booker assumed was mirrored in his own eyes. “So you’ve been kicked out of the kitchen then.”

“I was… ‘micromanaging’,” Nicky muttered.

Joe laughed but does not say more, and Nicky relaxed against him. Joe shifted so Nicky could rest in his lap while he brought his sketchbook around him to rest on his bent knee. Booker watched them silently. He didn’t know what to say, so he didn't say anything, and topped up his glass. Joe pretended not to watch him.

Cursing came from the kitchen, sharp and aggravated, and everyone but Nicky turned to glance at the doorway with furrowed brows. Booker made to stand, but without opening his eyes, Nicky stopped him. “Leave it,” he said, “Let her figure it out for herself if she does not want my help.”

“Someone’s in a bad mood tonight,” Booker commented as he sat back down.

Nicky tilted his head and opened one eye to glare at Booker, and somehow, it had the same effect as if he wasn’t resting on Joe’s lap with his hair skewiff. “I’m tired, I’m hungry, and it’s been a long day. We may be immortal, but we still need to eat,” he shut his eyes and tilted his head back. “And she added too much salt on _purpose_.”

Chuckling, Joe rolled his eyes at Booker before he picked up his cap that laid across Nicky’s stomach and dropped it over Nicky’s head so his face was entirely hidden by the open maw of the blood-stained denim cap. He grumbled but didn’t complain, voice muffled by the fabric.

Booker watched Joe lick the end of his finger before he rubbed it across the paper in heavy, controlled strokes before he wiped his finger on his shirt and picked the graphite up again. He couldn’t help but wonder what he was drawing. It was always a mystery until the very last moment when the final touches were applied and it unravelled like a grand tapestry. Booker was impressed every time, despite the hundreds of years he had seen it.

“Have you always been an artist?” He found himself asking, despite knowing the answer.

“No,” Joe’s reply was easy, albeit having answered the same question many times before. “I was a merchant, and then I was a soldier. I’ve been a soldier ever since. Art was always an indulgence of mine, a talent that awed me but I never had the opportunity to partake in myself.”

“You’ve come a long way from being a merchant. You’ve gotten good. I’d frame those if I had a house to hang them.”

“Well, I’ve had plenty of time to learn.”

He flashed Booker a smile before glancing back down at his drawing. Charcoal stained the palm of his hand, his fingers were grey with it, and his nails were black where they had bitten into the tool. Booker took another sip. He had never been an artist. It was too involved for him, too much work. It required too much skill, a skill he had never possessed. Joe was a creator, a maker. Booker destroyed things and blew stuff up. He took solace in the bottle and the burn it gave him. One of the only harmless things he had in his life, now.

“You’re staring, Booker,” Joe snapped Booker out of his thoughts. He hadn’t even realized that he was still watching Joe work. “Get out of your head. What do you want to say?”

“Nothing,” Booker said. “I’ve just never realized how messy art is. Especially how you do it. That’s all.”

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather be covered in charcoal and ink than blood and gore from me and my enemies,” Joe replied, voice light, as he used his finger to smudge another portion of the artwork. 

“Have you ever tried to do both?” Booker joked. “Make artwork out of the blood of your enemies?”

That made Joe pause, and he glanced up from his sketch for the first real to stare at Booker with new eyes. “The thought had never crossed my mind,” Joe sounded genuinely intrigued, and Booker tried not to laugh. That wasn’t the reaction he had been expecting.

“No,” Nicky mumbled beneath the hat, and Joe laughed again.

“No, then,” he said, but he winked at Booker, and he knew that the conversation was far from over. “Absolutely not. I would never.”

Booker knew better than to think that it was anything other than a joke amongst friends, but he could almost picture it- Joe stopping them in the middle of a mostly one-sided battle to add the finishing touches to his latest artwork with the blood he scooped up off the floor. “It probably wouldn’t keep for very long.”

“No. No, probably not,” Joe agreed, smiling down at his page. “How about you, Book? Have you learnt any new skills during the last two hundred years?”

“I told you, I already have a hobby.”

“Drinking does _not_ count as a hobby.”

“It does in France.”

“Maybe it _did_ in France but certainly not anymore.”

When Booker couldn’t think of an appropriate answer, he shrugged. There really was nothing to it. “Stick to what you’re good at, I say,” he took another sip at his drink, grateful that Joe was too invested in his sketch to even look up at him. “I like drinking and blowing stuff up. I don’t know what you want from me.”

“You like reading, and books,” Joe said. “You used to be a scholar.”

“I was,” Booker replied. “But just like you, I became a soldier, and have been one ever since. France didn’t have much use for scholars back then.”

“You don’t have to be a soldier. Not all the time, anyway. Not anymore.”

“You guys need me to be a soldier. Not a scholar,” Booker looked away. There really was nothing more to say on the matter. “I’m more useful, anyway. We all enjoy our vices. Mine just happens to be more… common than yours.”

Joe looked at him for a few moments too long, and Booker didn’t meet his eyes, just kept his gaze firmly fixed on the amber liquid in his glass. He pushed his hand through his hair, tugging at the strands just to give himself something to do, before letting it fall back against his scalp. Joe frowned and turned back to his sketch.

They sat in silence for a while, but Booker could not keep track of the time. He was maybe a few too many glasses deeper than he thought. But the sun had fully set behind the buildings and the sky had darkened until the faint hint of starlight began to sparkle up above. Nicky had fallen asleep in Joe’s lap, soft breathing covered by the denim cap over his face, and Joe was putting the finishing touches on his work.

Andy entered, looking flustered and frustrated, and thew up her hands. Her hair was askew like she’d been running her hands through it. “Dinner’s ready,” she announced without any joy. “I ordered take out from someplace down the street.”

“What happened to what you were cooking?” Booker frowned. “It sounded like it was going so well.”

Nicky was sitting up now, watching Andy with a knowing, almost smug expression, and she grit her teeth with narrowed eyes directed right at him. “I burnt it,” she said. 

“I told you that you had the heat on too high,” Nicky stood from against Joe. “You have no patience. You’d think that, after living for as long as you have, patience would be an innate skill. You are much better at tasting than you are at cooking."

“Don’t gloat, Nicky.”

“I’m not gloating.”

Their friendly bickering followed them into the kitchen and dissolved into silence the further they went. It was just Joe and Booker now, and Booker prepared himself for another awkward and odd conversation. 

But nothing came. Joe took one last, appraising look at his drawing before he ripped the page out of the book and kissed it in the top corner. He stood, glanced out the window, and as he passed Booker on the way to join the others in the kitchen, he handed the page out to him, who took it with a confused frown. “You drink too much, Booker,” he repeated kindly. “If you don’t find a new hobby, I won’t have any new material to use as my muse.”

He walked away without another word, and Booker was left alone with a charcoal portrait of himself, his hair a tangled uneven mess that fell into his eyes and his shirt collar tucked in, facing the open window with a half-full glass pressed to his lips, laugher in his tired eyes, a smile curing at the corners of his mouth, and even though the portrait was in black and white, colourless with thick charcoal strokes, he could clearly see the way the setting sunlight filtered in from the window to illuminate the liquid in his glass.

Booker folded the page and slipped it into his breast pocket before he downed the remainder of the drink in his glass and moved to join the others in the kitchen, leaving the half-drunk bottle and the empty glass behind.


End file.
